


So Here's the Plan

by Dashiell_Mirai



Category: Original Work
Genre: Aliens, F/M, Fluff, IN SPACE!, No humans, Office Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-22
Updated: 2018-07-22
Packaged: 2019-06-14 12:33:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15388848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dashiell_Mirai/pseuds/Dashiell_Mirai
Summary: In a galaxy far, far away, or possibly nearer than you think, there was an office. It was a dull place, full of lonely people.





	So Here's the Plan

The galaxy was full of improbable wonders. Invisible planets, people that existed without bodies, nebulae made of spun sugar, and great big machines that cut through the blackness and emptiness on wings of silverblue. And in the midst of this, Gakoul was bored.

It was a peculiar type of boredom, not widely known to active little creatures like you or me, the type that fogged your mind and swirled around you and mildly irritated you, but was always there, like an old spouse.

She leaned back in her chair, and let out a sighing array of clicks. The mouldering office chair creaked in agreement.

She drummed all four of her bottom legs on the desk, but not too hard. The flimsy desk would've collapsed if she did that. Flicking her antennae impatiently, she shifted her weight off the desk and chair and onto the threadbare industrial carpeting.

Gakoul popped her head up above the cubicle wall, like some ancient conqueror's soldier giving the enemy a friendly greeting on the wall of a fortress. Or like a groundhog. Not that she had the first clue what that was.

Dimly lit with cold, blueish panels, half of which were broken anyways, the office commons were mostly empty. Except for _him_.

Gakoul suddenly noticed, and tried to make herself a little scarcer. Her head ducked a little lower, and her antennae flattened against her head, she did what she liked to, and simply observed.

It was her observation that Sorana, when alone, did much better for himself than when he had company. Whenever anybody else was around, he would always stoop and slump, as if apologising for all two-and-a-quarter metres of his lanky body. He touched the world like it was made of glass.

When he thought nobody was watching, he carried himself like a prince. Spine ramrod-straight in the empty dimness, he was someone important. Even sipping water quietly by the water cooler, he looked regal, (despite his ill-fitting dress shirt and crooked tie) and far, far away from this dingy office.

Gakoul smiled under the cover of the cubicle's wall. Her co-workers probably would have given her funny looks, but they never saw this from Sorana. He always looked at least mildly nervous in the company of others, at times terrified outright.

_Poor thing_ , they would mutter. _It's his species._ And, while not every man is his species, Sorana did a fair job of confirming what people thought about Raeliens.

Gakoul recalled a lecture from her Interplanetary Histories class in Tertiary School. Apparently, several centuries ago, Raeliens had been prey to, well, she couldn't recall precisely what, but it was absolutely enormous, and had very pointy teeth. And, as the teacher had pointed out, it was also very extinct.

Gakoul had a certain respect for Raeliens from that day forward. The rest of the quadrant just thought they were sort of twitchy. And Sorana was quite twitchy- it's just that he was twitchy with _dignity_.

Gakoul slunk out from the cubicle partition. She convinced herself that she could use a drink anyhow, but the truth was, she was very, very bored. And more than a little lovelorn.

Quietly, she hove into Sorana's field of view to get to the refrigerator. He seemed to jump about half a metre, spluttering into his cup.

"M-Miss Xhengou!" he coughed. "Oh, you startled me! I-I didn't hear you."

Despite the fact that she knew this was going to happen, she felt a little bit bad about it. She didn't expect that he'd have spilled water down his front, which he had.

"Sorry, Sorana," she said, fishing a handkerchief out of her middle left pocket. "I guess I'll, I don't know, make a few clicking noises or something next time. You know, to alert you to my presence."

Sorana coughed harshly into his hand. "That does sound like a good idea. A-Although maybe saying hello would do the trick. Someone could mistake the clicking for a computer."

Gakoul shrugged. "Good point. Um, here, you got some water on your shirt."

The Raelien reached out to take the handkerchief she was offering, "Thank you very much, miss Xhengou."

She smiled a little. He always called people by their title, or their honorific of choice. Very polite. She liked polite.

She retracted her hand. Claw. Whatever you'd like to call it. "No, I'll take care of that."

His brow rose a fraction. "That's really n-not necessary…"

She waved her hand, still gripping the kerchief. "I insist."

He flinched a little as Gakoul delicately pat-dried his shirt. She was glad it wasn't caf, or tea, or something else that left a stain. She would've hated to ruin his dress shirt, even if it was somewhat ill-fitting, and in desperate need of a good ironing.

"Sorry," she muttered. "It's, uh, a bit of a tradition where I'm from."

He nodded. "Yes, I-I've heard about the etiquette codes on Khoulan."

"I've never cared much for them," she said, stuffing the handkerchief back into her pocket. "At least, not as much as my parents. You know," she said with a slightly forced laugh, "My mum would offer a cup of tea to every passerby who so much as sniffled. Now there was a woman who minded her manners."

Sorana smiled faintly. "S-sounds pleasant."

Gakoul rolled her eyes. "If you have to live like that, then it tends to get a little less than than pleasant. But that's just how life is."

Sorana looked down into his empty cup, wearing the tentative remains of a perfunctory smile. The awkward silence rushed in like air into a vacuum. Gakoul could've sworn she even heard a _whoosh_. This was not how she planned things to go.

Quickly, she looked at the clock on the wall. "Uh, so, the lunch interval seems to be coming up pretty soon."

He merely nodded, wondering what she was getting at. "Do you maybe… want to get lunch with me?" She took his momentary silence to mean that he needed convincing. "Um, I didn't really mean that we have to buy lunch, it's alright if you brought yours, I mean, I brought mine, and it's perfectly fine if you don't want to-"

He recovered from his temporary state of surprise. "I'd like that v-very much. Er, I did happen to bring my lunch, w-would it be alright…" He looked up at the ceiling and his fingers twitched as if he was counting off items on a list. "Would it be alright if we got some tea instead?" he finished.

"Oh. Um, of course," she replied. This was a mildly unwelcome adjustment to her plan, seeing as Gakoul didn't really care for tea, but that hardly mattered. Tea wasn't really the point of this. "So I guess I-"

Her sentence was cut off quite suddenly by the chime that signaled the lunch hour. She heard the rustles and _clanks_ and _clinks_ and _arghs_ that meant her co-workers were un-gluing their bottoms from their chairs, and would want lunch very soon.

"Oh. Well," she conceded, grinning at Sorana, "I guess we'll go get some tea."

He nodded while wearing a smile of his own. "Tea" was a bit of a subjective word nowadays. It could refer to any sort of drink you made by boiling things, but the "tea" people drank on Raelia was mostly sugar, and, all things considered, was pretty good.

"Er, I'll g-get my lunch bag, and we can meet in the… er, how does the l-lounge sound?"

She clicked her mandibles together twice, before remembering that no one who wasn't raised on Khoulan knew that was supposed to mean "Quite alright, thank you very much," and nodded quickly.

Like an invisible and un-hearable starting pistol had been fired off, they took off, Sorana presumably to the lockers, and Gakoul to her cubicle.

She tried to look calm, but it was hard to look calm when you were sorting through the pile of datapads on your desk with what looked like, and was probably franticness.

Xhengou Gakoul was by no means the obsessive-compulsive type. She just thought that, sometimes, it was nice to have a plan for things that mattered.

She surfaced from her slightly-messier-than-average desk-mess clutching a datapad in her chitinous fingers. She powered it on.

In orderly, optimistic letters, it read: "The Plan". Gakoul took a few deep breaths. This was just a reminder. A nice reminder.

"Step 1", it proclaimed, "talk to him. But not too much. And don't, for the love of the Great Bird of the Galaxy, make it awkward."

Gakoul closed the pad and set it down. This much, she thought, was going to be hard. It occurred to her that she had already been too long, and Sorana was probably in the lounge already, nervously fiddling with a kettle or something.

She grabbed the covered metal bowl sitting in that corner of the desk you put important things in, and dashed off up the stairs. The lift was very fast, but even in the twenty-third century, lifts were the galaxy's third-most awkward method of getting from one place to another.(Second and first place went to riding the tamed Great Sulphur Snail of Rigel IX, and the segway, respectively.)

When you have four legs which are built for fast, skittery kinds of motion, stairs and hallways are nearly nothing, and fairly soon, Gakoul was directly outside of the lounge. She pressed the door chime button, and it slid open with a whoosh a second after.

The first thing she saw was the enormous picture window, which looked out on space's black velvet cloak, studded with rhinestone stars. In the edges of the picture, the white metal branches of the city were visible, twinkling with alert lights and signal beacons and the bright eyes of other people, looking out into the void, too.

There was a frosted glass table outlined in swivel chairs that was almost in the center of the room, but a bit closer to the wall. There was a matching frosted glass table in the corner, a bit like the bigger one's little brother, that was laden with myriad shiny equipment for brewing caf, tea, and kyjen. (Kyjen wasn't a very popular drink anywhere but Jalisa, but the owners of the company were Jalisai, so everyone had to put up with the odd smell.)

Sorana was busying himself with the teakettle, which was so shiny and new that it didn't look like it had been used nearly often enough.

"Hello," said Gakoul, with a wave.

Sorana looked up very suddenly at her and looked slightly startled, although, thankfully, he didn't spill any boiling water from the kettle. "H-hello," he said in kind, spreading his hand with the palm outwards. Raeliens didn't really wave.

Gakoul poked thoughtfully at the opened tea tin on the table. She turned the lid over and read what it said in glossy letters. "Bila Dark Kelp Blend. Bila's on Raelia, isn't it?"

Sorana nodded. "Yes, I, er, got that tin from my aunt. She lived in Bila for five cycles." Gakoul nodded sagely, even though she had no clue how long a cycle was on Salia.

The kettle chimed gently. He frowned at it. As he sprinkled something dark green and squidgy into the boiling water, he remarked, "It's really quite odd. No matter how m-many times I use the kettles at work, I, er, never really get used to a k-kettle that chimes."

Gakoul pulled a chair out from the nearest end of the large table and sat in it. "Mm. I wouldn't really know. I'm not really a tea person."

Sorana lifted the lid and nodded his approval. "Well," he said, pouring a great deal of sugar into the kettle, "I am."

She frowned a little and gestured to the kettle. "Um, maybe you should watch how much sugar you're putting in there?"

He poured the dark bluish-greenish liquid into two metal cups on a tray. (Apparently, the Greater Jalisai Conglomerate had never heard of the mildly irritating human invention known as paper cups.) "Actually, it's a v-very proud point of tradition not to."

He set the tray down, and sat down with odd grace in the chair nearest Gakoul. She always wondered how he managed that. Being so tall and gawky did not generally lend itself to grace.

"Miss Xhengou," he addressed her, handing her a cup. She took it in her second set of hands, which was also her second set of feet. It was nice to have something good for both.

"Please," she said, "we've been at this job together for how long?"

"Four years," he said without missing a beat.

"Four years," she echoed. "Call me Gakoul."

"Er, alright," he said, without looking particularly concerned.

Gakoul gulped nervously, or at least she would've if she were human. Instead, she tensed her antennae and un-tensed them again. Here goes.

"Sorana," she said, trying to sound as casual as possible, and achieving the exact opposite, "Do you ever think about me?"

His scales tightened around his face like a cat's ears going back. It didn't take a doctor of Xenoanthropology to know that this was "self-defense mode".

"Er, what d-do you mean by that?"

"I mean," she repeated, taking very carefully modulated breaths, "do you ever think about me?"

"W-well," he said, taking a long pause. "Well, I do."

"How?" Her hands tightened around her teacup.

"Well, when we're working on a p-project together, or when…" He looked up at her. His eyes, which were a rather nervous shade of turquoise had become even nervouser. "Why do you need to know this, anyways?"

Gakoul's cheeks would've burned, if she had a circulatory system as we think of it. She didn't have a heart, either. But her biorhythm sped up as if she was being hunted. "I..." She paused. This bit was nowhere in The Plan.

_No_ , she thought. _The trouble with me isn't that I think too much. It's that I think too much in relation to how much I do._ Resolutely, she thought a conquering thought. _Thoughts are nice. They're very important, in fact. But thoughts by themselves never did anything but fill metaphysics textbooks, and that does the universe no good._

"It's because I think about you."

Sorana sat a little straighter.

Gakoul opened the dam she'd kept behind her mouth for years, and let all the words come pouring out in a quick, frantic spate of pure honesty. "And the problem is, I don't just think about you, I _think_ about you. When I'm alone, working, I think about what excuses I can make to come over to your cubicle, and I try to remember when the Raelien Peace Festival is, and what kind of gifts you give for that. I think about chatting with you and going to get Kalika food with you, but it's ok that we're just having tea now. And when I'm working with you, or we're chatting, or something, I think about what you think of me, and if I'm trying too hard to be funny, and I wonder if you shined your scales, because they look really nice, and, just…"

She trailed off, not sure how to finish. She decided that since she'd begun with honesty, she might as well end with it. "I just think of you so much, Sorana. You're so graceful, and smart, a-and so, so pretty."

Ruefully, something at the back of her head made a snarky remark about picking up his stutter.

Sorana, meanwhile, just sat there wearing an expression of curiosity and mild shock. The switch between fight, flight, and off was stuck somewhere between fight and flight.

"I'm sorry. It's ridiculous for me to expect the same of you when you don't even have a reason to," blurted Gakoul, trying to keep her racing pulse down.

Sorana took a very obvious deep breath. "When I-I said that I thought of you when we were working together…" he blinked in the way that you do when you want your thoughts to stop running around, screaming. "That may not have been the entire truth."

Gakoul's compound eyes widened. "Go on," she might have muttered. She was a little too stunned to remember whether she actually did or not.

"Gakoul, I… I think of you too."

This may very well have been the most important sentence Xhegou Gakoul had ever heard in her life up to that point. The leaders and activists and presidents and great playwrights that she learned about in school had wonderful words, some of which she'd taken fully to heart, but not once had their words made a piece of her life move.

Sorana didn't have to go on. But he did.

"I think about spending time with you, too. A-and not once have I thought y-you were trying too hard to be funny. I-In fact, I, er, quite enjoy your jokes."

He got up. Something was fluttering its wings in him, in the place where the throat meets the chest. _I believe_ , he thought, _it's called courage._

"Sometimes, er, a lot more often as of lately, I-I think up a plan. An excuse to talk to you, what I'm going to say, what I'm going to do. And, er, this was nowhere in it." He smiled, still a bit panicky. "Gakoul, I believe I'm going to need a new plan."

She smiled, too, one that you can just tell is made of genuine happiness, sheer relief, and just a hint of smugness. Smugness is normal when you turn out to be very right in a way you'd hoped you were.

"You know," said Gakoul, looking over at him. She looked at him how she often did, except, this time, she didn't mind that he noticed. "I don't think we really need one."

Sorana smiled up at her. It was probably the least-nervous smile he'd given anyone in years. "I d-don't believe we do."

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this short story, originally, for my school's literary magazine. It didn't make it, of course, because of my tendency towards long-windedness, but, to this day, it's the only story of mine I'm truly proud of. It's a cross between my own personal experience, my own imagination, Blue Sky with the serial numbers filed off, and a small dash of Star Trek, if you care to look for it.  
> ~ Cheers, Dashiell Mirai.


End file.
